David Lawrence was a Harvard Law student when an on-campus shooting involving a police officer sparked intense controversy over police conduct. Realizing that most policing errors occur when officers lack instant access to department rules, Lawrence dropped out to tackle the problem with AI. He teamed up with co-founders Amit Patankar, a Harvard MBA and former Google engineer, and Michael Gropman, a retired Boston police deputy chief, to launch Blue Voice —a Boston-based AI startup that provides real-time policy guidance to officers in the field.
Three years later, Blue Voice is coming out of stealth with $6 million in funding led by SignalFire and Las Olas VC. Officers at 225 county agencies across 25 states now rely on the tool daily to ensure their actions follow department protocol—a platform Lawrence likens to Harvey, the AI tool widely used by lawyers, or OpenEvidence, which is a similar tool for doctors. “When an officer makes a decision, they do so from memory or best guess, based on thousands of pages of law, policy, municipal ordinances, and state laws that they've internalized and keep in their head," Lawrence told TechCrunch.
Before Blue Voice, an officer who couldn’t recall a specific protocol—like the exact seventh step required at a crime scene—had few good options: flip through a 15,000-page manual, wake up a supervisor in the middle of the night, or search generic tools like Google or ChatGPT that lack police-specific training. The problem was that traditional methods took too much time, while consumer AI models delivered incorrect answers up to 30% of the time, Lawrence said.
Blue Voice says it solves this issue because it is trained on department-specific laws, local ordinances, protocols, and guidelines that general-purpose AI tools can't access on the public internet. The platform also gives officers instant access to detailed school maps on their phones during active-shooter emergencies. Today, Blue Voice answers a question every minute. Lawrence says that officers feel confident relying on the tool because it always points them directly to original regulations rather than just generating an answer on its own the way ChatGPT would.